A popular activity in most southeast Asian countries is trekking to minority hill villages. So we left enough time in our Myanmar itinerary to head northeast from Mandalay to a town called Hsipaw, from where we could trek and overnight in nearby Palaung villages that are said to be largely uninfluenced by Western culture and…

We talked a little bit about the Mustache Brothers show in our last post, but it’s such a spectacle that we thought it deserved its own post. There are three brothers: Lu Maw, Par Par Lay, and U Lu Zaw, but it’s essentially a one-man variety show with Lu Maw, the only English speaker, on…

By now you are probably sick of us telling you about temples. Your eyes start to glaze over, you wonder when we might post something about food again (soon, promise!), and you close the tab before reaching the end of our post. We can’t blame you, since we were still nursing a serious temple hangover…

Our first stop in Myanmar (which, by the way, was called Burma until the government changed the country’s name in 1989 when they replaced a slew of British colonial names) was Yangon (formerly called Rangoon, as in that ubiquitous crab appetizer that shows up on Chinese take out menus everywhere). We arrived in this hot sweaty…

We’ve visited countries such as South Africa with a sordid political and social history, a few such as India where class- and gender-based discrimination is rampant, and at least one–Uganda–where the current political reality is somewhere between worrisome and deplorable, but none can compare to Myanmar in terms of its government’s repression and persecution of…